re: Pogy boats dumped 850,000 fish off Louisiana coast

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Help me understand this.

The nets are killing the fish?

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They're huge nets that a couple of boats set out in a circle around the school of pogeys. Then they pull the nets tight, trapping everything in there and the big mother ship comes to pull everything aboard. Hundreds of thousands of fish crammed together in a net depletes all the oxygen in that water, so the fish suffocate to death before they even get pulled out of the water.

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Don't the boats want the fish to come on board alive? Or is it ok if they come on board dead?

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They don't care. The target species is all going on ice and to a processing plant anyway to be turned into fish oil and pet food

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And why are they dumping fish? Why would they catch fish simply to dump them back in the water?

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Dumping the unwanted bycatch. Or in the case from Holly Beach a while back, they cut the nets loose because there was so much weight in there that the mother ship wasn't able to pull the net out of the water